One of the world’s most eminent climate scientists – for several decades a warmist – has defected to the climate sceptic camp.

Lennart Bengtsson – a Swedish climatologist, meteorologist, former director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg and winner, in 2006, of the 51st IMO Prize of the World Meteorological Organization for his pioneering work in numerical weather prediction – is by some margin the most distinguished scientist to change sides.

For most of his career, he has been a prominent member of the warmist establishment, subscribing to all its articles of faith – up to and including the belief that Michael Mann’s Hockey Stick was a scientifically plausible assessment of the relationship between CO2 emissions and global mean temperature.

But this week, he signalled his move to the enemy camp by agreeing toÂ join the advisory councilÂ of Britain’s Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), the think tank created by the arch-sceptical former Chancellor Lord Lawson.

Though Bengtsson is trying to play down the significance of his shift – “I have always been a sceptic and I think that is what most scientists really are” he recently told Germany’s Spiegel Online, denying that he had ever been an “alarmist” – his move to the GWPF is a calculated snub to the climate alarmist establishment. Â Â Read more »

Harvard professor Robert Stavins electrified the worldwide debate on climate change on Friday by sensationally publishing a letter online in which he spelled out the astonishing interference.

He said the officials, representing âall the main countries and regions of the worldâ insisted on the changes in a late-night meeting at a Berlin conference centre two weeks ago.

Three quarters of the original version of the document ended up being deleted.

Prof Stavins claimed the intervention amounted to a serious âconflict of interestâ between scientists and governments. His revelation is significant because it is rare for climate change experts to publicly question the process behind the compilation of reports on the subject.

Prof Stavins, Harvardâs Professor of Business and Government, was one of two âco-ordinating lead authorsâ of a key report published by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) earlier this month.

His chapter of the 2,000-page original report concerned ways countries can co-operate to reduce carbon emissions.

IPCC reports are supposed to be scrupulously independent as they give scientific advice to governments around the world to help them shape energy policies â which in turn affect subsidies and domestic power bills. Â Â

Prof Stavins said the government officials in Berlin fought to make big changes to the full reportâs âsummary for policymakersâ. This is the condensed version usually cited by the worldâs media and politicians. He said their goal was to protect their ânegotiating stancesâ at forthcoming talks over a new greenhouse gas reduction treaty.

Prof Stavins told The Mail on Sunday yesterday that he had been especially concerned by what happened at a special âcontact groupâ. He was one of only two scientists present, surrounded by â45 or 50â government officials.

He said almost all of them made clear that âany text that was considered inconsistent with their interests and positions in multilateral negotiations was treated as unacceptable.â Â Â Read more »

NOTE: This op-ed is apparently too hot for some editors to handle. Late last week it was accepted and posted on politix.topix.com only to be abruptly removed some two hours later. After several hours of attempting to determine why it was removed, I was informed the topix.com editor had permanently taken it down because of a strong negative reaction to it and because of âconflicting views from the scientific communityâ over factual assertions in the piece.

The release of a United Nations (UN) climate change report last week energized various politicians and environmental activists, who issued a new round of calls to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Some of the most fiery language in this regard came from Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA), who called upon Congress to âwake up and do everything in its power to reduce dangerous carbon pollution,â while Secretary of State John Kerry expressed similar sentiments in a State Department release, claiming that âunless we act dramatically and quickly, science tells us our climate and our way of life are literally in jeopardy.âÂ

Really? Is Earthâs climate so fragile that both it and our way of life are in jeopardy because of rising carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions?

In a word, no! The human impact on global climate is small; and any warming that may occur as a result of anthropogenic CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions is likely to have little effect on either Earthâs climate or biosphere, according to the recently-released contrasting reportÂ Climate Change Reconsidered II: Biological Impacts, which was produced by the independent Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC). Â Â Read more »

To be consistent with the MSM breathlessly reporting all doomsday IPCC predictions (most of which never eventuate) will we see headlines of fracking saving the environment and insightful comment from global warmists backing the IPCC findings ?

When future generations come to look back on the alarm over global warming that seized the world towards the end of the 20th century, much will puzzle them as to how such a scare could have arisen. They will wonder why there was such a panic over a 0.4 per cent rise in global temperatures between 1975 and 1998, when similar rises between 1860 and 1880 and 1910 and 1940 had given no cause for concern. They will see these modest rises as just part of a general warming that began at the start of the 19th century, as the world emerged from the Little Ice Age, when the Earth had grown cooler for 400 years.

They will be struck by the extent to which this scare relied on the projections of computer models, which then proved to be hopelessly wrong when, in the years after 1998, their predicted rise in temperature came virtually to a halt. But in particular they will be amazed by the almost religious reverence accorded to that strange body, the United Nationsâ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which by then will be recognised as having never really been a scientific body at all, but a political pressure group. It had been set up in the 1980s by a small band of politically persuasive scientists who had become fanatically committed to the belief that, because carbon dioxide levels were rising, global temperatures must inevitably follow; an assumption that the evidence would increasingly show was mistaken.

Five times between 1990 and 2014 the IPCC published three massive volumes of technical reports â another emerged last week â and each time we saw the same pattern. Each was supposedly based on thousands of scientific studies, many funded to find evidence to support the received view that man-made climate change was threatening the world with disaster â hurricanes, floods, droughts, melting ice, rising sea levels and the rest. But each time what caught the headlines was a brief âSummary for Policymakersâ, carefully crafted by governments and a few committed scientists to hype up the scare by going much further than was justified by the thousands of pages in the technical reports themselves.Â Read more »

The latest report from the UNâs Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is due out next week. If the leaked draft is reflected in the published report, it will constitute the formal moving on of the debate from the past, futile focus upon “mitigation” to a new debate about resilience and adaptation.

The new report will apparently tell us that the global GDP costs of an expected global average temperature increase of 2.5 degrees Celsius over the 21st century will be between 0.2 and 2 per cent. To place that in context, the well-known Stern Review of 2006 estimated the costs as 5-20 per cent of GDP. Stern estimates the costs of his recommended policies for mitigating climate change at 2 per cent of GDP â and his estimates are widely regarded as relatively optimistic (others estimate mitigation costs as high as 10 per cent of global GDP). Achieving material mitigation, at a cost of 2 per cent and more of global GDP, would require international co-ordination that we have known since the failure of the Copenhagen conference on climate change simply was not going to happen. Even if it did happen, and were conducted optimally, it would mitigate only a fraction of the total rise, and might create its own risks.

And to add to all this, now we are told that the cost might be as low as 0.2 per cent of GDP. At a 2.4 per cent annual GDP growth rate, the global economy increases 0.2 per cent every month.

Those are massive costs…I doubt the world could sustain them, let alone have them work at all.Â Read more »

Chairman Whitehouse, Ranking Member Inhofe, and members of the Committee. Thank you for the opportunity to testify at todayâs hearing.

In 1971, as a PhD student in ecology I joined an activist group in a church basement in Vancouver Canada and sailed on a small boat across the Pacific to protest US Hydrogen bomb testing in Alaska. We became Greenpeace.

After 15 years in the top committee I had to leave as Greenpeace took a sharp turn to the political left, and began to adopt policies that I could not accept from my scientific perspective. Climate change was not an issue when I abandoned Greenpeace, but it certainly is now.

There is noÂ scientific proofÂ that human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) are the dominant cause of the minor warming of the Earthâs atmosphere over the past 100 years. If there were such a proof it would be written down for all to see. No actual proof, as it is understood in science, exists.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) states: âIt isÂ extremely likelyÂ that human influence has been theÂ dominant causeÂ of the observed warmingÂ since the mid-20thÂ century.â (My emphasis)

âExtremely likelyâ is not a scientific term but rather a judgment, as in a court of law. The IPCC defines âextremely likelyâ as a â95-100% probabilityâ. But upon further examination it is clear that these numbers are not the result of any mathematical calculation or statistical analysis. They have been âinventedâ as a construct within the IPCC report to express âexpert judgmentâ, as determined by the IPCC contributors. Â Â Read more »

THE unprecedented cost of energy driven by the renewable energy target and the carbon tax had destroyed the nation’s competitiveness, Tony Abbott’s chief business adviser has declared.

Maurice Newman also says climate change policies driven by “scientific delusion” have been a major factor in the collapse of Australia’s manufacturing sector. “The Australian dollar and industrial relations policies are blamed,” Mr Newman said. “But, for some manufacturers, the strong dollar has been a benefit, while high relative wages have long been a feature of the Australian industrial landscape.”

In an interview, Mr Newman said protection of climate change policies and the renewable energy industry by various state governments smacked of a “cover-up”.Â Read more »

The New Zealand Kyoto commitment as measured by the Government fell to Zero in April of 2013 the actual commitment in Millions of Units was 29.1M Units but because the value of these Units is linked to the price in Euros of a CER on the European Exchange and that fell to âŹ0.01 effectively zero our units are deemed to be worth less than a CER (though why a unit of carbon is worth less in NZ than it is in Europe is beyond me) this made our 29.1 million credit worth nothing.

Letâs consider that we can actually measure our commitment with any certainty for the moment.

The price of carbon has fallen from around âŹ 12.00 in 2008 to effectively zero âŹ0.01 in April 2013. This fall is due to the manipulation of the market by the EU in allowing the market to be flooded with CERâsÂ and now by the complete loss of credibility of the UN IPCC and the Catastrophic AnthropogenicÂ Global Warming Â scenario painted by that organisation. Â The IPCCâs 5th Assessment report has been bagged by scientists and the press alike.Â James Delingpoleâs article in the TelegraphÂ headlined âThe climate alarmists have lost the debate: it’s time we stopped indulging their poisonous fantasyâ sums it up.

Delingpole quotesÂ IPCC lead author Dr Richard Lindzen as saying Â the IPCC has Â “sunk to a level of hilarious incoherence.” Nigel Lawson has called it “not science but mumbo jumbo”. The Global Warming Policy Foundation’s Dr David Whitehouse has described the IPCC’s panel as “evasive and inaccurate” in the way it tried dodge the key issue of the 15-year (at least) pause in global warming; Donna Laframboise notes that it is either riddled with errors or horribly politically manipulated â or both; Paul Matthews has found a very silly graph; Steve McIntyre has exposed how the IPCC appears deliberately to have tried to obfuscate the unhelpful discrepancy between its models and the real world data; and at Bishop Hill the excellent Katabasis has unearthed another gem: that, in jarring contrast to the alarmist message being put out at IPCC press conferences and in the Summary For Policymakers, the body of the report tells a different story â that almost all the scary scenarios we’ve been warned about these last two decades (from permafrost melt to ice sheet collapse) are now Â graded by scientists to somewhere between “low confidence” to “exceptionally unlikely;” . Â Read more »

As seen in the following graphic, over the period of the satellite record (1979-2012), both the surface and satellite observations produce linear temperature trends which are below 87 of the 90 climate models used in the comparison.

…

So, about 95% (actually, 96.7%) of the climate models warm faster than the observations. While theyÂ saidÂ they were 95% certain that most of the warming since the 1950s was due to human greenhouse gas emissions, what theyÂ meantÂ to say was that they are 95% sure their climate models are warming too much.Â Read more »